Kenneth Balfelt Team // Johan August

Meeting at Kunsten, 2021

About the work

In Kenneth Balfelt Team // Johan August’s new work Meeting at Kunsten, meaningful meetings are the key issue – in terms of both setting and content. At the centre of the gallery space, they have created a meeting room with a difference: a functional meeting room in a relaxed setting. A calm environment has been created by bringing nature inside in a specially designed architectural expression, whose organic forms, nature sounds, plants, and rocks resemble both a garden and a greenhouse for human growth. In this quiet environment, users of the meeting-room – enterprises and public institutions, staff at Kunsten, visitors, and others – may test out various formats for a meaningful meeting. The screens in the installation provide guidelines along with a published meeting guide.

Everyone is welcome to book the room and test the meeting format – or observe it from the outside when in use. You can also book a free meeting facilitator to guide you through the meeting format at Kunsten’s website.

Context

How to hold a good meeting? Our meeting culture is one of today’s major time robbers. Many people experience their time being wasted in meetings that are either badly planned, include too many people, or are inconclusive.

The latest figures from the stress association Stressforeningen show that some 500,000 Danes feel burned out and stressed due to work. While many enterprises have stress policies in place for when an employee is hit by long-term stress, only few have a strategy for avoiding this. A way to achieve a sustainable and less stressful working life might be to create a balance between work and restitution. Too much activity and not enough restitution on a daily basis will affect our performance mentally and physically – at work and at home.

Pauses can be difficult to fit into our ideal of productivity and constant activity. Recent brain research shows that pauses are important for mental performance and well-being. This is the view of, for example, Kjeld Fredens, adjunct professor and brain researcher at the Institute of Learning and Philosophy, Aalborg University, who also believes pauses promote the quality of work and that they constitute a ‘quality vitamin for the brain’.